


Grieve With Thee

by Leyenn



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Episode Tag, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-24
Updated: 2012-10-24
Packaged: 2017-11-16 23:49:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/545172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leyenn/pseuds/Leyenn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When they're alone the truth can come out for a little while, no matter how much it hurts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Grieve With Thee

He finally goes up to join her hours later. The first place he looks is where he finds her - in their bed, burrowed into a pile of luxuriant blankets he's never seen before. She's used the time to shower; her hair looks faintly damp and he can smell the rich, comforting scent of expensive soap. Nothing's ever too good for his River, for Sexy's favourite child.

Especially now.

He strips off his suit - River does not approve of clothes in bed, whatever the circumstances - and slides across to her. Crawls, more appropriately, because their bed is excessively large and easy to get lost in at the best of times, which this is not. Right now it's huge and dark and warm and silent and exactly what they both need - somewhere to hide from the cold, unfeeling universe outside their doors.

He touches her arm first, soft skin cold even under the blankets. He imagines he can feel the sticky trail of blood, the heat of bruising flesh under his fingertips. His palm over the back of her wrist makes her flinch.

"River."

She doesn't answer him, but she does let his fingers slide between hers, and grips his hand even tighter than an Angel. He pulls himself close against her back, worms his other arm under and around her waist and holds on tight. Her hearts beat hard against his chest.

"It matters to me," he murmurs, just behind her ear. "It matters very much to me," because it does and she should know that, that despite his initial selfishness he does hurt for her, as much and more than for himself. River has hardly had parents at all in the usual sense of the word, but in her own inimitable style she's still managed to find her family... and now she's lost it all over again. 

And however good a husband he might make himself be, he can never give her that back. 

"No one more than me," he promises her, and though she doesn't move or speak, she grips his hand even harder and he can feel the moment her sadness breaks through the walls she's put up around herself, the moment she simply can't hold back from showing him the pain any longer.

"You could try and see them again, you know." It's a stupid suggestion even as he's making it but he still can't resist. "Vortex manipulator and all that. Less flashy than the old girl. Go and find them, just for a visit-"

"And risk tearing the planet in half?"

He closes his eyes, rests his forehead against her still-damp hair. "You're hurting," he whispers, desperately, trying to explain. "You're hurting and I want to make it stop." If he can't quell his own pain, he wants at least to take away hers.

"Oh, sweetie. You can't." She squeezes his hand. "I wish you could, but you can't."

He sighs. "Why did you really lie to me, River?"

He feels her stiffen, just a touch, and the silence holds for a long moment until she sighs, too, knowing he won't let this go now.

"Change the future, you said." Her voice is quiet: he can tell this will be the truth. "If I could have made you believe I could do that, maybe you'd have found a way, too." She sucks in a tight, sudden breath. "I tried, my love, I'm sorry, I tried so hard but I had to - I couldn't-" and then she sobs, just once, and he thinks he feels both hearts break.

He kisses her hair, squeezes her so tight and it's still not close enough. He made her break her own wrist and she's the one apologising and it makes him feel sick. "It's _not your fault_ ," he whispers in her ear, fiercer than staring down Demon's Run, because he has to make sure she knows that. "I asked the impossible."

She makes a tiny sound that on any other day would be a laugh. "You always do. And Dad..." Her breath catches. "Rory managed it."

"And if you had, too? New York would probably never have existed." She's right about tearing the Earth in half: a paradox is a paradox, no matter the size. Time has a way of coping, but only to a certain point, and in that city it's stretched to breaking already. He's glad that at least he doesn't need to explain these things to her. "It was stupid and flippant of me to even ask, and I-" He strokes the length of her wrist, trying not to wince. "I made you hurt."

"I've coped with much more than a broken wrist in my time, sweetie."

"That's not what I meant." He knows she knows that, of course. So much dancing that they do around each other, even when they shouldn't. Especially when they shouldn't, and for this one brief span of time together he can't stand to do it any more. "I'm sorry, River."

"It's okay."

"No, it's not." But he will make it okay. He will. 

"River," he says, slowly, softly, deliberately. He does not do this lightly, nor would he for anyone but her. "The first time I met you-"

"Don't." She rolls over instantly and pushes him down onto the bed, stricken look in her eyes, desperate, one hand going to cover his mouth. "Don't, you can't tell me-"

"You were beautiful," he finishes, looking calmly up at her, and watches her hand drop and her eyes go wide with shock. To anyone but River, what he's just done would be the simplest of simple compliments: only they know it's not simple at all.

Now she will always be that, to him, in that moment. It's an absolute. Fixed in time as surely as her broken wrist. 

This time when she pulls back her hand he's ready, and catches it just before she manages to slap him into next week. She glares murderously down at him, his wild, naked, angry, incredible _beautiful_ wife, and he knows it doesn't matter what he's just said at all. He might recognise her and he might not, but he can't imagine he'd ever look at River and feel anything but this. 

He hopes she doesn't feel quite the same right now, though, because her eyes are burning with fury and her voice is sharp enough to cut atoms. "Why would you do that?" She doesn't break his grip, though he knows she could. "Why - just for - and you talk about _stupid_ -"

She seems to be struggling for words, so he helps her along by pulling her down onto his chest and catching her expertly in a kiss. River kisses best when she's either turned on or furious, and right now she's both: he can taste it in her mouth, always willing to devour his even when she'd just as easily punch him in the face. He buries his fingers in her hair, trying to make sure she does the former rather than the latter for as long as absolutely possible.

When he finally does dare to let her go she's breathing hard, her lips reddened and her curls made even wilder by his fingers. Her thigh is pressing between his own, her hands splayed out across his chest; she rubs her fingers along his collarbone.

"Oh, you..." She trails off and sighs. "You impossible man." But this time there's no anger left in her voice. "Why do you insist on being so-"

"Because of you," he says honestly, and the pain eating at them both dims for just a moment against his schoolboy delight when River Song is actually, for one long moment, speechless. He so rarely manages to do that.

And yet he can't help but remember that this is the woman who gave him every future life she could have had - who stopped Time itself for him and would have held it in her grasp forever had he not shown her his own way out. River loves him that much and yet she's so afraid to let him feel the same, and he wishes that just once, just this once, she would believe that he does.

He cups her face gently in his hand; strokes down her cheek, along the line of her jaw, and braces himself for the odd tugging pain that will come as he lets the regeneration energy flow out from his fingertips.

She gasps, but he holds her tight and presses a kiss to her lips. _Trust me_ , he whispers to her, into her mind where he's so rarely allowed - where he so rarely allows himself to go - and after a long second River takes a breath and relaxes against him, even going so far as to stroke his hair back and nuzzle her face into his neck, a gentle distraction from what he's doing.

He breathes slowly through it, the soft golden bleed out until there are years and years of it hanging between them, wrapped around them like gossamer, like fairy dust: tendrils of electric warmth that twist and shimmer across her naked shoulders, that make his skin tingle and his head spin, light-headed like blood loss. Later he might let these years slide under her skin, if she lets him; right now he just needs her to see them, even if no one else does.

"I'm not ageless," he murmurs into her hair, a quiet secret shared just between them, the evidence of it right there in the very air they're breathing. "I'm _old_ , River." 

_Sometimes too old._

She looks up at him; the energy dances in her hair and for just a moment her eyes are golden, too. "They're gone," she says, her voice hoarse and breaking and just as quiet, "and I know it hurts you so much, and one day-"

"I know." He doesn't need to hear her say it. One day she'll be gone, too, and in the strangest way she's grieving for that as much as she is her parents.

"I'm ageing," she whispers. Finally, that one simple admission, and it makes him smile.

"We both are."

"It's not the same."

"And I remember why." Oh, what he would give to rewrite that one page, to give back those lives and share them with her the way they should have been shared. What he would give to keep her from hurting like this.

"Don't you dare. I don't regret it." She's still telling him the truth, he knows that, but one can regret a single thing in many different ways. "It's just that every time you see me-"

He puts a finger to her lips again. A strand of gold coils around it, brushing her lips like a kiss, and he feels her shiver. "River," he murmurs, and smiles at the tears that well in her eyes. "My River," and she smiles even as she starts to cry, strong and silent and for once honest, without trying to hide from him at all.

He draws her back down to him then, strokes and kisses her hair, wraps her up in the golden touch of Time and whispers things in her ear in their own long forgotten language, things like _love_ and _want_ and _beautiful_ , like _mine_ and _this_ and _us_ and all the hundred words for _forever_.

*


End file.
